Mamma cinema

Bellissima 1951 Italy (114 minutes) directed by Luchino Visconti; screenplay by Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Francesco Rosi and Visconti; story by Cesare Zavattini.

A working class Roman screen mother is among hundreds who drag their daughters to a casting call for young girls at Cinecittà, Italy’s Hollywood.

This classic of Italian neorealism contrasts the hardscrabble existence of the post-World War II star-struck Roman working class with the predatorial, cynical and self-conscious phoniness of the film industry, Italian style.

Anna Magnani brings to the role of the mother, Maddelena Cecconi, an enormous personality and emotional intensity, a dominating screen presence, and an insatiable desire for her daughter Maria (the five-year-old Tina Apicella in her only film) to have all the things Maddelena wanted for herself but thought she never could have.

In one sense, this tale is a farce: an intense screen mother ludicrously loads her passionate hopes, ambitions, daydreams and frustrations on the shoulders of a tiny child barely aware of her own selfhood.

The movie industry knows this. It also knows that its next box office idol is among this running, pushing, screaming, crying, fiercely competitive and anxious mass of screen mothers and their precious prodigies. 

The neorealist component is that this is a story about the individual personalities this cast of actors brings to life in these circumstances, not just facile stereotypes to laugh at. How these characters grow and change makes for a drama more interesting to watch than the story itself. The cinematography is breathtaking.

The narrative opens at a radio broadcast studio with a full orchestra and chorus performing Gaetano Donizetti’s Quanto è bella, quanto è cara (How beautiful she is) from his comic opera L'elisir d'amore (The Elixir of Love).

A radio announcer reports that Stella Film in Cinecittà is sponsoring un grande concurso for girls 6-8 years old, seeking una graziosa bambina Italiana—a talent contest to find its next child star. This announcement unleashes a torrent of screen mothers and their daughters through half-constructed monumental outdoor sets on the Cinecittà lot to the soundstage where girls will be selected for screen tests.

The surge of humanity disgorges a woman in a dark suit (Magnani) gesturing passionately to an official-looking middle aged man that she has lost her daughter: she cannot find her daughter and they cannot start without her. Magnani’s Maddelena draws the camera like a magnet. She also attracts studiohand Alberto Annovazzi (Walter Chiari). 

Maddelena and Annovazzi find the small child (Apicella), frightened by the ravenous mass of women, playing by herself near a pool. They rush her to the soundstage where a film director (Alessandro Blasetti, playing himself) and his production team are casting a girl for the film Oggi-domani-mai (Today-Tomorrow-Never).

Maddelena pushes her way to the front, carrying the child to the stage; her eyes shine with pride and her heart beats with the child’s every word reciting a poem little Maria learned by heart. Blinded by her love and high hopes for the girl, Maddelena pleads histrionically with the director and his staff.

The director gently points out that the girl looks young for the role, reminding Maddelena that he needs girls between the ages of six and eight. She insists that the girl is seven (Apicella is a small five-year-old). The director invites Maria for a screen test, the first ‘yes’ in what seems certain to be Maddelena’s ‘death of a thousand yeses.’

This ‘opportunity’ only fuels Maddelena’s imagination. She gathers from other mothers that she needs to bring photographs of the girl next time. She can see that the other older girls sing and act better, can dance, and are specially dressed.

Maddelena and her husband Spartaco (Gastone Renzelli) live with their daughter on a sub-street floor of a tenement in Rome’s Prenestino neighborhood. American movies and live entertainment shows are given in the large inner courtyard of the surrounding buildings.

Spartaco is absorbed by the small house or apartment they have been saving up to move to. He has a regular job and spends a lot of time with his friends; it seems clear that he ‘picks his battles’ with his wife. He becomes concerned when Maria starts to seem unusually tired all the time. Spartaco’s family evidently think Maddelena is a bit touched.

Maddelena makes a living giving injections to diabetics. This gives her the income to engineer her daughter’s movie career.

She has a professional photographer take the girl’s picture and hires ‘La Actrice’ Tilde Spernanzoni (Tecla Scarano), a self-important, threadbare old fool who hangs around their tenement, to give Maria ‘acting lessons.’ She commissions a tutu from a dressmaker and tries to enroll the child in a dance class with another self-important, pompous older woman with a foreign accent. Maddelena later leaves Maria at a hairdresser’s salon with La Actrice with a disastrous (but cute) result.

Maddelena tries to use the ‘friendly’ studiohand Annovazzi to work an ‘inside connection.’ Annovazzi, a member of Blasetti’s entourage, gives her a wised-up spiel about ‘recommendations.’ Maddelena can consider her daughter as good as already cast, but 50,000 lire distributed by him as ‘favors’ to the right people would seal it. A little up-front money is not much to ask, with the prospect of a million-lire film contract.

(The rate of exchange at that time was 625 L to the dollar, so this would have been $80 then. The fantastic-sounding sum of one million lire would have been $1600 in postwar dollars.)

Fifty-thousand lire happens to be what Spartaco and Maddelena have saved up for the new house. Maddelena’s romanesca gut tells her that Annovazzi is a liar, but her hungry heart wants to believe. A disaster seems unavoidable.

As Blasetti says to an associate in the midst of the operatic dénouement, ‘You see, Antonelli. This is cinema. We’re responsible for all this.’

But character will out. There is a double surprise ending—and a sweet finish for film buffs. Talking quietly in their apartment at the very end of the film, Maddelena notices Burt Lancaster’s voice in a movie playing in the courtyard.

Four years later, Magnani co-starred with Lancaster in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo (1955), her first English-speaking role in a Hollywood film and the one for which she received an Academy Award for Best Actress.